The story, the setting, the costumes said "another Oklahoma." The audience said "nothing doing." That was the beginning and the end of this latest musical's attempt to spread its wings in Boston and coast down to the Great White Way.

It's a blood and thunder saga o the career of Billy the Kid, who "in the brief span of twenty-one years sent twenty-one men to untimely graves," the musical manages to keep a plot together while the audience witnesses at least fifteen of the murders in addition to innumerable songs and dances. The music is good, though nothing for the Hit Parade. The cast and scenes are colorfully symbolic of New Mexico, the locale of the story.

Outstanding treat of the show is Susan Reed, the folk song singer of Cafe Society fame. Twanging on her lyre, she narrates the unportrayed episodes of the drama at intervals between the swiftly moving seenes. Her charms, however, prove incapable of restraining a restless audience, hastening to leave, before she concludes the show. This is bad management on the part of the producers, who should know that the average audience has got to have a shock or a thrill right up to the last second.